Preheat oven to 350° unless you are going to use the broiler to toast the bread, in which case you can wait to turn on the broiler and then reduce the heat to 350° for the baking cycle.

Heat butter in a saucepan until it has browned, about five minutes. Remove from heat and let cool about five to ten minutes - you want the butter to still be liquid but not so hot it that it causes the eggs to cook when you add them. Then whisk in eggs, half-and-half, brown sugar, flour, vanilla, maple syrup and cinnamon. Pour into a wide, flat container (like a lasagne pan or a big Tupperware container.)

Spray a wire cooling rack with cooking spray (or grease lightly with oil or a little butter) and place it inside a baking sheet. Two if you have them.

Start toasting the bread. You can either use a toaster or arrange the bread on the racks and broil for a minute or two on each side. The idea is to toast the bread and then soak the warm toast in the egg/half-and-half mixture so that it absorbs.

Take two pieces of warm toast at a time and submerge them in the custard for about sixty seconds (you'll start to see air bubbles as if you are drowning them - drowning them in GOODNESS.) Shake excess liquid off and arrange pieces on the wire cooling racks. Mine fit eight perfectly and I baked two sheets at once. Bake at 350° for fifteen minutes, turning after seven minutes (if you are baking two sheets switch their positions in the oven at this time.) Repeat with toast, custard soak and bake until both loaves and the custard are gone.

Let cool on the racks for thirty minutes, then place in freezer for an hour. Transfer frozen toast to Ziploc bags and freeze to store.

Notes: Did that make any sense? It seems so obvious when I was doing it (toast soak bake freeze) but I am not sure if I didn't just garble things a little. The idea came from Cook's Country (a magazine I like) but I tweaked it a lot. The process takes time and is a nice weekend project, I think. The payoff comes on weekday mornings when you can create really good french toast in thirty seconds with the toaster. Ta DA!

We make french toast on the weekends (the regular way), then use waxed paper to separate & place in a ziploc, squeeze out air, and freeze. 30-45 sec in the micro and breakfast is ready on the weekdays!

(We do the same with waffles or pancakes, so there is always a variety frozen. Just make a larger batch so you know you'll have extra to freeze.)

Bless you! I have been searching for ways to make breakfast more hearty and yummy. I only have about 10 minutes every morning to feed my gang of school-aged kids. Cereal and frozen waffles have outworn their welcome.

I can't shake the feeling that everyone on the internet has much, much more freezer space than we do. Ours is just the top of a not particularly new, not particularly large Kennmore fridge, and with a few bags of frozen vegetables, a box of veggie burgers, a pint or two of ratatouille, ice cream, and some ice cubes, it is pretty much 100% full. Tragedy!

I'm with you redfox! We seem to have zero freezer space. The item on the top of my Christmas wishlist? A standalone freezer! Then again it was at the top of my Mother's Day list and birthday list, so check back with me on Dec. 26th.

Still, I so want to try this as alternating Pop-Tarts and whole wheat toast is getting stale in my house, too.

It's great how you have your recipes tagged with keywords, like "toddler approved." It's also awesome how your kids eat so well, with lots of good, healthy variety. I sometimes feel guilty that my 2 year old won't eat anything except mac and cheese. His favorite is mac and cheese ravioli. Never should have let him seen it while shopping.

I have a chest freezer in the basement. I got it at Costco for storing frozen breastmilk after my husband complained there was no room for food in our fridge freezer because it was full of milk. It's a Costco brand freezer made by Whirlpool. I think it's 7 cubic feet and was $150 four years ago. Not bad really. It now houses a variety of make ahead and store bought (but healthy and good) foods as well as staples I bought on sale. I give it 5 stars.

I knew! I wasn't the only one who ended up with an extra freezer thanks soley to breast milk! LOL I'm pondering the recipe and then suddenly smiling in my wine glass... my husband's last straw came one day when he opened the freezer of our side-by-side and a landslide of frozen breastmilk crashed onto the kitchen floor. I ended up filling that baby with over 500oz of milk, thankyouverymuch, and the next child was successfully breastfed instead of pump pump pump bottle bottle bottle pump pump how much did we pay the fertility clinic for this? pump pump (nipples fall off).

Oh right, french toast... we thaw ours in the micro then put in the toaster for a bit to get the crunchy. But our bread is thicker so the first part is necessary. Your ingredients are tempting me to try it Julia style. BTW, thank you for your buttermilk pancake recipe bc they freeze great, too! I'm all about a quick, healthy weekday bfast.

Graced - I'm sure with that many tomatoes you've already tried these, but I'll throw is out there: chili, tomato salads (with olives or cucumbers or feta or bread with a balsamic-red wine-dijon mustard-basil dressing), beef sandwiches (crock pot a cheap beef roast (think $1.99 to $2.99/lb) with a bottle of beer, a bunch of tomatoes, and some pickle peppers or giardinara, serve on crusty rolls), stew, freeze them whoel for use later (wash first, leave skins on, core if you'd like, freeze, skins peel off when thawing to make chili or marinara later).

I have used both our normal 12 grain wheat and a dense sandwich white - the white is better but the wheat is better for you and still ok. Challah would be awesome.

As for the extra eggs they are there purely to get egg into my egg hating child. They make a richer custard and add to the bake times, as does toasting the bread in advance (because the bread has released more moisture before soaking and thus takes in more custard.) So if you reduce the number of eggs and or choose not to pre-toast you will need to reduce the amount of time in the oven.

Finally, it is true. I have freezer space out the ying and the yang. My theory is that the further you get from a grocery store the cheaper the land is per square foot so you can have oversized garages that house things like extra refrigerators and Sears chest freezers. We did not mean to have an extra refrigerator by the way, it just happened. The people who sold us this house insisted on taking their fridge with them. So we moved ours and discovered... the fridge was still here.

Just a thought, for this and your other recipes - Put your URL or blog name on the top of the print-out version, so we can suitably credit you or find our way back to your site when this printed copy gets past on, or into the old big binder of priceless recipes...